LAWYERS

Michael D. Hausfeld

1700 K Street, NW Suite 650
Washington, DC 20006
202.540.7200 ph
202.540.7201 fax
mhausfeld@hausfeldllp.com
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Michael D. Hausfeld, one of the country's top civil litigators, is the Chairman of Hausfeld LLP.

His career has included some of the largest and most successful class actions in the fields of human rights, discrimination and antitrust law. He has an abiding interest in social reform cases and was among the first lawyers in the U.S. to assert that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination prohibited by Title VII; he successfully tried the first case establishing that principle. He represented Native Alaskans whose lives were affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Later, he negotiated a then-historic $176 million settlement from Texaco, Inc. in a racial-bias discrimination case.

In Friedman v. Union Bank of Switzerland, Mr. Hausfeld represented a class of Holocaust victims whose assets were wrongfully retained by private Swiss banks during and after World War II. The case raised novel issues of international banking law and international human rights law. In a separate case, he also successfully represented the Republic of Poland, the Czech Republic, the Republic of Belarus, the Republic of Ukraine and the Russian Federation on issues of slave and forced labor for both Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. He currently represents Khulumani and other NGOs in a litigation involving the abuses under apartheid law in South Africa.

Mr. Hausfeld has a long record of successful litigation in the antitrust field, on behalf of individuals and classes, in cases involving monopolization, tie-ins, exclusive dealings and price fixing. He was a member of the ABA Antitrust Section’s Transition Taskforce, which advised the incoming Obama Administration. Mr. Hausfeld is or has been co-lead counsel in antitrust cases against manufacturers of genetically engineered foods, managed healthcare companies, bulk vitamin manufacturers, technology companies and international industrial cartels. He is involved in ongoing investigations of antitrust cases abroad and pioneering efforts to enforce competition laws globally. He was the only private lawyer permitted to attend and represent the interests of consumers worldwide in the 2003 closed hearings by the EU Commission in the Microsoft case.

Mr. Hausfeld has been featured in many articles and surveys. The National Law Journal has recognized him as one of the “Top 100 Influential Lawyers in America” and the Legal Times named Mr. Hausfeld among the top 30 “Visionaries” in the Washington legal community in 2008. The New York Times referred to Mr. Hausfeld as one of the nation's “most prominent antitrust lawyers,” and in 2009 the Washingtonian named him one of thirty “Stars of the Bar.” Most recently, the Global Competition Review stated that Hausfeld LLP “is clearly recognized as one of the best plaintiffs firms in the country.”  In the past, the magazine has reported that he “consistently brings in the biggest judgments in the history of law” and that he is “a Washington lawyer determined to change the world -- and succeeding.” Mr. Hausfeld is one of thirty negotiators profiled in Done Deal: Insights from Interviews with the World's Best Negotiators, by Michael Benoliel, Ed.D. He has been described by one of the country's leading civil rights columnists as an “extremely penetrating lawyer” and by a colleague (in a Washington Post article) as a lawyer who “has a very inventive mind when it comes to litigation. He thinks of things most lawyers don't because they have originality pounded out of them in law school.” The US Legal 500 in 2008 stated, “The outstanding Mike Hausfeld is a titan of the antitrust bar.”